Tales from the front line in the hunt for the perfect SCART television for use with the MAME arcade game emulator.

Saturday, 25 February 2012

My second ever Siemens

Siemens TVs are pretty rare in Australia. I've only seen four in my time: 1 under a ton of hard rubbish, 1 on eBay (which is now in my lounge room), 1 in an alley way (with spray paint over the screen) and another recently advertised on eBay (keeping my other Siemens company in the lounge, as of today).

Siemens televisions house chassis made by Grundig. The first Siemens I bought was a digital chassis whereas the one I picked up today has a stack of lovely analog trimpots (Siemens chassis CS 9106 = Grundig chassis CUC 5630).

Having spent some time today messing with my new Sharp Image universal chassis and, frankly, feeling pretty disappointed by the geometry, I fired up the new Siemens to see how it compared. As I suspected it would, it kicks ass! Using the trimpots at the back you can get the borders nicely in MAME before starting a game. With the universal chassis it's much more of a compromise whereas the CUC 5630 let's you get very close to perfect geometry. Pretty crazy considering the Siemens cost me AUD $10 and the Sharp Image was AUD $240!